Differentiated service on the Web by managing TCP connection

Despite the explosive growth of the Web and the ever-increasing resource demands on the servers, the current Web service model treats all requests equivalently, both while being processed by servers and while being transmitted over the network. For some uses, such as multiple-priority schemes, different levels of service are desirable. We propose Web-server application-level TCP connection management mechanisms to provide two different levels of Web service (high and low service) by setting different time-outs for inactive TCP connections. We evaluated the performance of the mechanism under heavy and light loading conditions on a Web server. Our experiments showed that, though heavy traffic saturates the network, the high-level class performance is improved by at most 25-28%. Therefore, this mechanism can effectively provide QoS even in the absence of operating system and network support.